On Friday, the 5th November 1948, a member of the Constituent Assembly of India put a Motion to postpone the consideration of the Draft Constitution
I would like to mention some extracts from the speeches made by the Hon'ble Members of the Constituent Assembly of India on Friday, the 5th November 1948, regarding the motion of an amendment for consideration of the Draft Constitution to be postponed by Seth Damodar Swarup:-
"Shri Damodar Swarup Seth (United Provinces: General):*[Mr. President, with your permission I want to place this amendment before the House: Whereas the present Constituent Assembly was not elected on the basis of adult franchise and whereas the final constitution of free India should be based on the will of the entire people of India, this Constituent Assembly resolves that while it should continue to function as Parliament of the Indian Union, necessary arrangements should be made for convening a new Constituent Assembly to be elected on the basis of adult franchise and that the Draft Constitution prepared by the Drafting Committee be placed before it for its consideration and adoption with such amendments as it may deem necessary."
"Sir, the first characteristic which a constitution-making body of a free country should possess is that it should be able to claim that it represents the will of the entire people of that country. Sir, with your permission I would put it to the Honourable Members present in this House whether they can sincerely claim that they represent, in this House, the entire people of India. I can emphatically say that this House cannot claim to represent the whole country. At the most it can claim to represent that fifteen per cent of the population of India who had elected the members to the provincial legislatures. The election too, by virtue of which the members of this House are here, was not a direct one, they are here by virtue of an indirect election. In these circumstances, when eighty-five percent of the people of the country are not represented in this House and when they have no voice here, it will be in my opinion a very great mistake to say that this House is competent to frame a Constitution for the whole country. Besides the representative character of the Draft Constitution that is being placed before the house, we have also to consider its nature. We see that the Constitutions of United States of America and Britain have been copied in this Constitution. Some articles have been borrowed from the Constitutions of Ireland, Australia and Canada. A paper has rightly remarked that this is a slavish imitation of the Constitutions of these countries. Sir, the conditions that prevailed in America, Britain, Canada or Australia do not obtain in our country."
"I want to ask whether there is any mention of villages and any place for them in the structure of this great Constitution. No, nowhere. The constitution of a free country should be based on 'local self government'. We see nothing of local self-government anywhere in this Constitution. This Constitution as a whole, instead of being evolved from our life and reared from the bottom upwards is being imported from outside and built from above down-words. A constitution which is not based on units and in the making of which they have no voice, in which there is not even a mention of thousands and lakhs of villages of India and in framing which they have had no hand, - well you can give such a constitution to the country but I very much doubt whether you would be able to keep it for long."
"The Union that would have been formed in our country in this way, would not have required so much emphasis on centralization as our learned Doctor Ambedkar has laid. Centralization is a good thing and is useful at times but we forget that all through his life Mahatma Gandhi emphasised the fact that too much centralization of power makes that power totalitarian and takes it towards fascist ideals. The only method of safeguarding against totalitarianism and fascism is that power should be decentralized to the greatest extent. We would have thus brought about such a centralization of power through welding of heart as could not be matched anywhere in the world. But the natural consequence of centralising power by law will be that our country which has all along opposed Fascism - even today we claim to strongly oppose it - will gradually move towards Fascism. Therefore, Sir, I want that this House should seriously consider these matters. This is not an ordinary matter. We should not treat this constitution-making as a light and playful business. On the contrary it is a step pregnant with historic consequences. After hundreds, nay, thousands of years I would say, and it would be no exaggeration to say so, that in the history of India it is for the first time that we have this opportunity of framing the Constitution of the whole of India. Therefore no amount of thought we can give to this Constitution can be too much. We may be told and we have been told that let this Constitution be adopted, for the assembly, elected on adult franchise provided therein, would be quite competent to effect the necessary amendments in it."
"But Sir, when the Constitution is once framed, there will be legal difficulties in amending it. Moreover it would be no matter of pride for us that a task of such importance in the history of India, which we are expected to complete, should have been left half-finished by us to be completed by others. The coming generations will only deplore such a course of action on our part. Therefore if we take into consideration the unrepresentative character of the Draft Constitution that is before us and its nature and structure, we come to the conclusion that it is not in harmony with our present conditions, our culture and our customs. Therefore it is necessary that we should postpone its consideration for the time being and should form a new Constituent Assembly on the basis of adult franchise so that it may go through this constitution, consider it and amend it where necessary. Till the formation of this new Constituent Assembly the present Constituent Assembly can function as the Parliament of India. We do not want that there should be any delay in this. No doubt we have taken two years to do this work and we might take an year or so more but one or two years are nothing in the life of a nation. So long as this Constitution is not finalised we can continue to function as we have been doing so far. As I have said we are going to frame the Constitution of United India; it should be a new and ideal Constitution."
"Today after India has attained freedom it is not necessary for me to tell you that the world is looking up to India. It expects something new from India. At such a times as the present one it was necessary that we should have placed before the world a Draft Constitution, a Constitution, which could have been taken as an ideal. Instead we have copied the constitutions of other countries and incorporated some of their parts and in this way prepared a Constitution. As I have said, from the structure of the Constitution it appears that it stands on its head and not on its legs. Thousands and lakhs of villages of India neither had any hand nor any voice in its framing. I have no hesitation in saying that if lakhs of villages of India had been given their share on the basis of adult franchise in drafting this Constitution its shape would have been altogether different. What a havoc is poverty causing in our country! What hunger and nakedness are they not suffering from! Was it not then necessary that the right to work and right to employment were included in the Fundamental Rights declared by this Constitution and the people of this land were freed from the worry about their daily food and clothing? Every man shall have a right to receive education; all these things should have been included in the Fundamental Rights. But, Sir, I need not say anything else except point out that even Honourable Dr. Ambedkar has had to realize and has also admitted in his speech that many objections have been raised in regard to the Fundamental Rights. Not withstanding the reasoning of the learned Doctor, I find it difficult to accept that the Fundamental Rights and other rights are one and the same thing. I understand that Fundamental Rights are those rights which cannot be abrogated by anybody - nay, not even by the government. One can be deprived of these rights only as a punishment for an offence, awarded by a Court of Law. But if the Fundamental Rights were to be at the mercy of the government, they cease to be Fundamental Rights. Sir, what I mean by all this is that if the thousands of villages of the country, the poor classes and the labourers of India had any hand in framing this Constitution, it would have been quite different from what it is today."
"With your permission, therefore, Sir, I would appeal to the House that, treating this Constitution not as ordinary but as a historical document, they should give proper consideration to it. And I would appeal to you, sir, that consideration of the Draft Constitution be postponed for the present and the country be given an opportunity to express itself so that the Constitution that may be framed may really be a democratic Constitution. With these words I close my speech on the amendment."
"Prof. Shibban Lal Saksena (United Provinces: General):Mr. President, Sir, Seth Damodar Swarup's amendment should not be dismissed so lightly as my Honourable friend Shri Balkrishna Sharma has done. We ourselves, when the Cabinet Mission were in India, wanted that this Assembly should be elected on adult suffrage; but the Britishers never wanted election on adult suffrage. They forced on us this method of election. If they had acceded to our demand, we would have been elected on adult suffrage. Seth Damodar Swarup knows full well that the Congress party which is in the majority in this House, would have welcomed it. The issue which he has raised is a fundamental one and we must all admit that an Assembly elected on adult suffrage would be the real Constituent Assembly, though I am sure a large majority of these same members would be again returned."
"Sethji has also raised other issues. He has said that this Constitution does not give any voice to the villages. He is thinking of the Soviet Constitution. Mahatma Gandhi's own Constitution, of which an outline was given by Shri S. N. Aggarwal, was also based on village republics or village panchayats, and I think we shall have to discuss this point carefully when we come to that aspect of the Constitution. I was pained to hear from Dr. Ambedkar that he rather despised the system in which villages had a paramount voice. I think we will have to amend that portion properly. This Assembly is now entering upon its task and is fully entitled to change the entire Constitution. Sethji has today given his amendments and we shall be very glad to discuss them. I do not think that Sethji is alone in the views he expressed. We must not dismiss these things with the lightness with which my predecessor has dismissed them. In this Assembly we must discuss every aspect of this Constitution with seriousness and everybody must be treated with respect. Other things which he has said, can also be discussed at the proper time. He has said that there is no provision in this Constitution for Local Self Government in units. It is an important thing which must be included in the Constitution and at present there is this omission in the present Constitution."
Milap Choraria
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